Artwork

True emotions

2018-

Flowers have been with us as tokens of emotions since the dawn of time. In religions around the world they are used to celebrate fallen heroes, to profess love and to mark anniversaries and personal accomplishments. Photographer Petr Jedinak realized this early in his career as a celebrity photographer for Reflex, a landmark Czech magazine. His path then brought him into the private quarters of Pragues artists, intellectuals and celebrities who harboured fond memories in dried flowers:

“I realized there is something about bouquets that makes them tokens of strong emotions when I was shooting in the apartment of Prague prima ballerina Adele Pollert. She had her whole bedroom decorated with dried bouquets, once luscious, that she had received for her shows. It was spectacular and unsettling at the same time.”

Orgasmic BEAUTY

2014-

Photographer Petr Jedinak spent three years shooting the Orgasmic Beauty series. The collection now encompasses several hundred silver and glass plates featuring over a hundred models.

“My main drive was to shed light on a mystery. The female orgasm is mysterious to me, because I will never experience it. When I shoot it, I get to touch something volatile.”

He chose to eternalize the moment using a rare 19th century technique:

“Wet plate collodion only allows me to make a single original, no copy or retouch. The very silver layer that witnessed the moment remains fixed to a glass plate. In essence, I create a magical fetish out of that moment. I do it in order to bring back the mystery that has been lost in age of digital photography.”

Privacy

2014-

Perhaps the most controversial of Jedinak´s collections stems from his admitted fascination by human sexuality. The scenes of Privacy allow the viewer to become a voyeur in the dark recesses of the bedrooms of contemporary people. The name Puraibashi and concept for the series derives from his lifelong fascination by Japanese culture, where he observes

“…a great divide between the public and the private. A person´s private life embodies the forbidden, in a direct suspension to their public persona tied by traditions and expectations of society that weigh on them and create perversion. The privacy, or Puraibashi, goes seemingly unacknowledged but it is ever-seeping into the public through works of art. So I decided to point my lens there.”

Jedinak´s signature 1851 technique evokes raw eroticism of the cafés and cabarets of old that saturates the oldest preserved pornographic materials dating back to the dawn of photography.